Things to do in London this weekend

There may not technically be any England matches over the weekend (the Three Lions’ next fixture taking place in the early hours of Monday morning) but the World Cup is still very much worth pulling up a stool for, with a host of tantalising fixtures taking place as the knockout stages continue.

Friday night features the last of the Round of 32 fixtures, with Australia vs Egypt and holders Argentina vs plucky debutants Cape Verde, followed by the final R32 match Colombia vs Ghana in the early hours of Saturday morning. The Round of 16 kicks off on Saturday with a double header of Canada vs Morocco and Paraguay vs France, while before five-time winners Brazil face Erling Haaland’s Norway on Sunday evening.

The best thing about the non-England matches is that most venues won’t charge for tickets, as there’s obviously much lower demand. Just show up, order your pint and enjoy the show. From Mare Street Market to The Dial - Home of Meantime, click through see where in London is showing all World Cup fixtures. And if you’re sizing up England’s potential route to the final, check out who the Three Lions could take on next. 

Frida Kahlo’s brought the sun to London. Tate Modern has sold more advance tickets for Frida Kahlo: The Making of an Icon than for any exhibition in the Tate gallery’s 128-year history. And it’s not surprising. 

This exhibition sets out to show how Frida became one of the most recognisable artists of the 20th century and a source of inspiration for generations of artists who followed. Alongside 23 paintings and 11 works on paper by Kahlo, there are photographs she sat for, her jewellery, a selection of Indigenous Mexican clothing from Kahlo’s wardrobe, and an excerpt from a film by Nikolas Muray capturing a tender moment between Frida and Diego.

And then there are several galleries devoted to documenting ‘Fridamania’: the shrines, sacred hearts and handcrafted tributes that transformed Kahlo from artist into folk hero before turning her into a global brand.

More than seventy years after her death at the age of 47, the Mexican artist remains a cultural phenomenon: a painter, fashion muse, feminist icon and, as the gift shop attests, a patron saint of tote bags and tea towels. Expect it to be busy!

BST is back again this summer, bringing some of the world’s biggest pop stars to Hyde Park for its 13th edition. After opening weekend gigs from country megastar Garth Brooks and K-pop icons Ateez, this weekend features three massive gigs headlined by US pop rockers Maroon 5 (Friday 3 July), foot-stomping folksters Mumford and Sons (Saturday 4 July) and New Wave veterans Duran Duran (Sunday 5 July). 

There are some great support acts on the bill too; Jess Glynne and Ella Eyre feature on Friday, The War on Drugs open for Marcus Mumford and co, and Duran Duran are joined by Scissor Sisters, Nile Rodgers & CHIC and Groove Armada DJing. 

And if you’re up for some spontaneous plans, you can still grab general release tickets for all three gigs, starting at £114.35, £124.95 and £99.95 respectively. But hurry, before they’re all gone!

If you thought walking up to your favourite painting in the National Gallery was as close as you could get to a masterpiece, think again. At Frameless, 42 masterpieces from 29 of the world’s most iconic artists are presented in ways never seen before, reimagined through cutting-edge technology, animation and soundscapes. Situated in Marble Arch, Frameless plays host to four unique galleries with hypnotic visuals and a dazzling score, where visitiors can enjoy 90 minutes of surreal artwork from Bosch, Dalí and more, for just £23.60.

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When you think of London summer, plenty of things come to mind: music festivals, Primrose Hill hangs, swims in Hampstead Heath ponds, tins by Regent’s Canal, but when it comes to the great pillars of our city summer, one event wears the crown: the Wimbledon Tennis Championships – aka the oldest, and arguably the very best, tennis tournament in the world. 

This year, the action began this week, and will continue through to next Sunday. Thousands of people will be descending on SW19 to see the matches IRL. If you haven’t got tickets and don’t fancy camping overnight to get in, there are plenty of live screenings taking place all over London you can go to instead. 

And you won’t be missing out on any of the Wimbledon staples at these screenings either, with jugs of Pimms and punnets of strawberries available at nearly every location, you’ll hardly notice the difference from Murray Mount. Even better – most watch parties won’t cost you a single penny. So, pack your picnic blanket, fill your flask and pull up a pew at a summery screening near you.

RECOMMENDED: Our full guide to Wimbledon 2026.

First there were the hit TV thrillers: Borgen, Wallander and The Killing. Then came the movies: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, In Order Of Disappearance and the sublimely twisted Headhunters. Then the Scandi noir wave kinda petered out, with a Hollywood brain drain drawing a line under these blackly funny, bleakly violent and deviously plotted studies of humans deep in the shit. 

Thankfully, Danish writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen and his on-screen muse Mads Mikkelsen seem hellbent on reanimating the genre Their latest and most leftfield team-up sees the pair hang an endearingly offbeat exploration of men’s mental health on the framework of a crime thriller. 

Riders of Justice’s Nikolaj Lie Kaas is Anker, a brooding bank robber with major anger issues. Fresh from prison, he’s got the weekend to find out where his mentally unwell brother Manfred (Mikkelsen) buried the loot before local gangster Flemming (Nicolas Bro) starts chopping off body parts.

Warmth, empathy and severed fingers in the same film? Scandi noir is back. 

Rev your engines! The British Grand Prix 2026 kicks off this Friday and to get London hyped, Atlassian Williams has set up a fan zone in Piccadilly Circus in collaboration with Estrella Galicia. Throughout the race weekend, the pop-up will let you get up close to full-scale FW48 show car, compete for prizes in a trivia game, experience an immersive race simulator lap around the Silverstone Circuit, get behind the wheel on a haul truck simulator and pick up a copy of the Silverstone special edition Williams x Marvel comic. In between all of that, fans can take a pit stop at the bar and refuel with a complimentary pint of Estrella Galicia 4.7% lager or Estrella Galicia 0.0. 

Hiding in plain sight, you’ll find the demure Camille on the very edge of Borough Market. It’s a small, pretty place. There are a handful of tables outside, and a chic burgundy and primrose colour scheme within. It doesn’t shout about its elegance, but rather whispers it seductively into your ear. Opened a couple of years back by the same team behind Soho’s Ducksoup, this French bistro immediately blew its forebear out of the water thanks to the skill and tenacity of head chef Elliot Hashtroudi. He’s not French himself, but is committed to the full-throttle nature of the country’s rustic, earthy cuisine. A case in point; offal. You’ll find cocks comb schnitzel and snout cassoulet on the menu, and both are sublime. For the less adventurous, there is still a world of wonder here. The tartare is one of the best we’ve had, and rosy slices of onglet are topped with Pevensey blue cheese. It’s a triumph of imagination, talent, and guts.

Hampstead locals go all out over summer to celebrate their neighbourhood, with a series of events throughout June and July comprising the Hampstead Summer Festival. But the grand finale is this weekend’s Big Fair, taking place on Sunday afternoon on Heath Street. The fair takes the form of a carnival-style street party complete with art, food and craft stalls, live music, family activities and community group performances. You might even see a few famous Hampstead faces among the crowds. And once you’re done playing hook-a-duck and browsing the craft stalls, pop over to Art Street on Keats Grove to check out the annual exhibition of work by local artists and schools.

Faithfully capturing the simple joys and craziness of the beloved 1980s TV cartoon, the Masters of the Universe story starts in Eternia, a beautiful, fairytale fantasy. Here, sensitive little Prince Adam is told to ‘be a man’ by his father who forces him into combat training. When the family are attacked by the evil Skeletor, Adam is sent to Earth via an intergalactic rainbow highway (very Thor). Adam gets a Clark Kent-type job in HR before retrieving his magical sword and going back to fight for Eternia. After decades in development hell, Masters of the Universe finally fell into the right hands with Bumblebee director Travis Knight. Where other reboots lean into dour origin stories, his is as brightly coloured as a bowl of e-numbered breakfast cereal. It features many of its fan-favourite, straight-out-the-toybox battle characters and best of all is the epic rock/synth score by British composer Daniel Pemberton. 

The National Theatre has brought back 2007’s blockbuster War Horse, a show that closed on the West End in 2016 but has lived on via endless tours and a Stephen Spielberg-directed screen adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s source text. It’s still incredible. Number one, the puppets are astonishing. Number two: sure, it’s a reasonably trope-filled story about the First World War, adapted by Nick Stafford from Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 book with a plot that revolves around the doomed British cavalry who discovered they were obsolete in the worst way possible during the early weeks of the conflict. It’s sturdy, unfussy storytelling, but this gives it a purity and timelessness.  The years haven’t touched War Horse, and short of a radical rethink of our attitude to WW1 or, puppets, it’s hard to imagine why it would ever age. 

High Society is, of course, a pure joy, the stage incarnation of a ludicrously frothy Golden Age Cole Porter musical that has a plot you could blow over with a feather, plus some of the greatest songs of the twentieth century. ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’, ‘I Love Paris in the Springtime’, ‘Well Did You Evah’, ‘Let’s Misbehave’, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ – the banger level is off the chart. With songs as good as these and a cast just as good to match them, you’re in for a very nice evening at the theatre. 

Is it art, or is it maths? It’s a question even MC Escher himself couldn’t answer about his own work. While the Dutch printmaker known for his infinite staircases, metamorphosing tessellations and paradoxical buildings was rejected by the art world, he was revered by mathematicians and is now one of the most famous optical illusionists of all time. The OG creator of images that make you go ‘Huh?’ is going under the microscope in London with a blockbuster exhibition celebrating his life and work this summer. Created by Italian company Arthemisia and the immersive peeps at Fever, MC Escher: The Exhibition has arrived at Somerset House as part of its world tour. If you are a gaga for geometry, are fascinated by fractals, or just have a penchant for the psychedelic, you will find plenty to be engrossed by here. 

One of Peter Shaffer’s most fondly remembered works is 1965’s Black Comedy, a throwaway one-act drawing room farce designed with astoundingly virtuosic precision, like a gaudy Christmas cracker that turns out to have a Fabergé egg inside. In it, skint artist Brindsley Miller tries to play off his ex, his fiancé, his neighbours, his fiancé’s dad and a guy from the electricity board as he frantically attempts to get his flat ready to impress a visiting German millionaire in the middle of a power cut. Shaffer’s audacious innovation is to reverse the lighting cues, so that when the lights in Brindsley’s flat are on, we’re plunged into total darkness, and when the lights are off, the theatre is brightly lit but the characters in the play can’t see anything. If it was significantly longer, it might run out of steam. But at one 90-minute act it’s damn near immaculate.

Works by Yung Lean, 070 Shake, Foals’ Yannis Philippakis and Charlize Theron will all be featured in this audiovisual exhibition at 180 Studios, created by film director Romain Gavras and producer Surkin (also know as Gener8ion). Visions of 2034 will display seven new and previously unseen short films, alongside an immersive installation and unseen Gener8ion footage and visuals. The immersive space will take visitors to a fictional world of 2034, where ‘hundreds of skittish and charasmatic’ characters will be waiting to greet them as they explore the works celebrating music, art, cinema and choreography. 

In our age of mind-boggling CGI and AI-optimised everything, it’s easy to forget how much pleasure can be had from the simple optical tricks of mirrors and lights. But not for Julio Le Parc. A key figure of the Kinetic and Op Art movements of the 1960s, the pioneering Argentinian artist has been making illuminated, kinetic and participatory works for seven decades, and is still making art at the ripe old age of 97. This major retrospective celebrates his visionary seven-decade career, spanning from from his arrival in Paris in the late 1950s to his resurgence in the 2010s, with over 60 colourful, immersive (and extremely Instagrammable) works.

Aussie singer-songwriter Eddie Perfect’s all-singing take on the 1988 Tim Burton classic is very definitely a retelling, taking most of the core elements of the supernatural comedy and positioning them together in a very different, very ’20s musical theatre way. Alex Timbers’ production was a big Broadway hit. Here, David Fynn’s Betelgeuse is a mischievous spirit with foreknowledge of the imminent deaths of Barbara and Adam Maitland, whose house he’s been haunting (or at least lurking in) for some years. He’s the lead character from the off, greeting us with an onslaught of meta-wisecracks and iffy pop cultural references as he outlines the beginnings of his very convoluted scheme to gain a foothold in the human world via Lydia Deetz, the daughter of the family that buys the house after the Maitlands croak it. It has nice sets, nice ballads and if you like aggressively knowing 21st century Broadway humour, you’ll have fun.

After pulling in millions of visitors in Amsterdam and Barcelona, Moco Museum London has landed beside Marble Arch with a three-floor showcase of modern, contemporary and immersive art. Inside, you’ll find more than 100 works from names including Banksy, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Yayoi Kusama, alongside immersive digital rooms and sensory installations designed to pull you into the artwork. There’s also the limited-run exhibition ‘Voice of the Street’, dedicated to Haring’s legendary New York subway drawings from the early 1980s. Flex-entry tickets start from £15, so you can drop in whenever suits during opening hours.

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As one of Britain’s most celebrated sculptors of the 20th century, Barbara Hepworth made stunning modern creations inspired by the nature and lanscapes of Cornwall, where she lived. Her abstract shapes often featured smooth ovals, holes, undulating surfaces and strings. This summer the Courtauld will stage an exhibition interested in one aspect of Hepworth’s practice: her obsession with colour, which often came up in her work in unexpected ways. Featuring 20 of her most significant sculptures, alongside 30 drawings, Hepworth in Colour will unite for the first time her early innovative sculptures with colour of the 1940s with major examples of her work with colour from the 1950s and 1960s.

Broadwick Soho arrived with serious flair in 2023 and has been serving up a hit of West End glamour, that feels both indulgent and effortlessly cool ever since. Tucked inside the hotel, Dear Jackie is its seductive Italian dining room, all Murano glow, red silk walls and plush booths that could tell a few stories. The menu leans into refined Italian comfort with superior pasta and reimagined classics, making it an ideal spot to settle in for dinner.

With this exclusive Time Out offer, you can sink into Soho’s newest slice of dolce vita decadence for less with a three courses set meun and a glass of Champagne (worth £22). The perfect pre-theatre treat or the start of a night that might run on far longer than planned.

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Mexican architecture firm LANZA atelier has been chosen to design this 2026 Serpentine Pavilion, which features a ‘crinkle-crankle’ wall. Traditional structures seen in English architecture from the 18th century, these wavy partitions temper climate, create shelter, and are ideal for growing fruit. And fittingly, they’re also known as serpentine walls. The prestigious architectural commission celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2026, with a landmark series of talks programmed in collaboration with the Zaha Hadid Foundation. 

It’s been over 40 years since Supergirl last appeared in a solo movie. The extremely camp 1984 version may have developed a cult following, but it left a mark on the character’s public perception, branding her with a certain silliness. This new version attempts to rehabilitate her into someone tougher, smarter and less likely to get in a fight with a runaway bulldozer.

Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock), cousin of Kal-El/Clark/Superman, has just turned 23, a birthday she’s ‘celebrating’ by bar-hopping across planets with her dog, Krypto, and trying not to interact with anyone. Her maudlin drinking plans are screwed up when she’s pestered by Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a child seeking someone to help her exact revenge on Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts), a space brigand who slaughtered her family. When Krem poisons poor Krypto, Kara pursues him across the universe to seize the antidote, reluctantly taking Ruthye with her. 

This is unquestionably the best Supergirl movie, in a field of two. It never really flies to any great heights, but stays at a pleasant cruising altitude. 

The National Portrait Gallery’s summer 2026 exhibition is turning the spotlight on one of the twentieth century’s biggest icons. Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait will be a real blockbuster, exploring the legacy of one of Hollywood’s most alluring figures through works by some of the twentieth century’s greatest artists and photographers, including Andy Warhol, Cecil Beaton, Marlene Dumas, Milton Greene and Eve Arnold. 

North London rockers Wolf Alice have graduated from the O2 to an enormous all-dayer in Finsbury Park. The four-piece have spent the past decade evolving from grungy upstarts into one of Britain's most beloved alternative bands, thanks to pop gems like ‘Don’t Delete the Kisses’, the coming-of-age classic ‘Bros’ and the sprawling, cinematic ballad ‘The Last Man on Earth’.

They’re supported by a host of other ethereal indie-pop purveyors, including The Last Dinner Party, Lykke Li, Rachel Chinouriri, Keo, and Florence Road.

General admission tickets are still available from £78.50, and yes, you might see us crying in the crowd.

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The first major European exhibition of James McNeil Whistler’s work in 30 years arrives at Tate Britain in 2026. Known as a truly global artist, The Victorian oil painter re-wrote many of the rules of art, and was an early adopter of ’art for art’s sake’. The retrospective brings together the artist’s world-famous paintings such as ‘Whistler’s Mother’ (Mr Bean fans will recognise this one, IYKYK) alongside rarely, or never seen, works. It includes exquisite portraits, drawings, prints, and designs, from as early as his teens in St Petersburg to the enigmatic late self-portraits.